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The Genius of George W. Bush

By FRANK RICH



After months of deriding the president as an idiot, Democrats have
to face the fact that he is at the very least an idiot savant — and
just possibly a genius.

The final proof is The Great Stem Cell Compromise. "This is way
beyond politics," said George W. Bush while pondering his verdict.
What's more, he told the nation, he had found a solution to please
everyone. His plan will at once "lead to breakthrough therapies and
cures" and do so "without crossing a fundamental moral line."

 In fact, everything Mr. Bush said is false. His decision was
completely about politics. It will slow the progress to
breakthrough therapies and cures. It did force the pro-life
movement he ostensibly endorses to cross a fundamental moral line.
And yet the politics were so brilliantly handled — and exquisitely
timed, for the August dog days — that few vacationing Americans
bothered to examine the fine print, which didn't arrive until the
final seconds of an 11- minute speech. Few have noticed, at least
not yet, that the only certain beneficiary of this compromise is
George W. Bush.

 Denigrated as a lightweight and a slacker, he seized on the stem
cell debate to transform his image into that of our philosopher
king — grappling mightily with the science and ethics of an issue
he and his handlers hyped as "one of the most profound of our time"
— even as he induced religious-right political leaders to sell out
their principles and sent Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile
diabetes patients to the back of the medical research bus. As an
act of self-serving political Houdinism, this is a feat worthy of
Mr. Bush's predecessor, another master at buying time when caught
in a political corner with no apparent way out.

 If you spend a week talking to scientists actively involved with
stem cells, which I did, the most enthusiasm you can find for Mr.
Bush's compromise is lukewarm. "It could have been better, it could
have been worse," as Sloan Kettering's Harold Varmus, the former
head of the National Institutes of Health, puts it. Jerome
Groopman, a Harvard Medical School professor who has worked on bone
marrow stem cells, calls the president's decision "unprecedented"
in the way "it ignores the fundamental needs and process of
experimental medicine" by "holding research hostage to private
companies" that own many of the 60 stem cell lines that Mr. Bush
has approved for federal study. "No company has the kind of
resources that can match the N.I.H. for the kind of free scientific
inquiry that might bear fruit," says Dr. Groopman. Besides, he
adds: "There isn't a soul alive who can testify that these 60 lines
can give us what we need. The success of science depends on a
string of failures, and no one can work at a laboratory bench with
his hands shackled behind him."

 "Where are those lines? Are they any good? Are they available?"
asks Doug Melton, a leading stem cell scientist who had a 45-minute
meeting with the president, Karl Rove and other political
operatives in July. It's not enough, Dr. Melton says, "to say there
are cells at Singapore at this phone number and go get them." Since
there has been no firsthand scientific investigation of the quality
of these far-flung lines, some of them could prove stale, unstable
or insufficiently varied for research purposes.

 But even if by some miracle they're all just what the doctors
ordered, Dr. Melton fears delays of many months for all the
lawyering required to sort out the intellectual property rights of
the Bush-blessed cells before their private owners ("who have now
been given a mini- monopoly") will transfer them to academic
researchers. It was only four days after Mr. Bush's speech that the
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, allied with the pioneering
stem cell scientist James Thomson, sued its biotech partner, the
Geron Corporation, over who controls which commercial rights. Evan
Snyder, another prominent stem cell researcher at Harvard, fears
that some owners of Bush-approved stem cells could restrict their
intellectual property as zealously as "Coca-Cola and its secret
formula or a computer company that won't give out the secrets of
its latest chip."

 Dr. Snyder also points out that the administration is
"scientifically naοve," since some of its approved cells may have
been extracted by already outdated mid- 1990's technology. "We can
now get stem cell lines that are more efficacious and heartier," he
says. "Would we fight new infections only with penicillin and sulfa
and not the new antibiotics?" He also worries about a potential
brain drain beyond the well-publicized decision by Dr. Roger
Pedersen of the University of California to decamp to Cambridge
University in pursuit of scientific freedom. It's possible that
"new intellects and talents we'd like to see jump into the game"
will go into other fields, given the roadblocks to stem cell work.

 As if these barriers to the expeditious pursuit of life-and-death
research weren't enough, the Bush administration has also yet to
appoint its new director of the N.I.H. — the person needed to run
all the bureaucratic and legal gantlets separating researchers from
the approved stem cell lines. Will that appointee have to pass an
ideological litmus test, and if so, will there be a lengthy Senate
confirmation fight?

 The president's new council on stem cells, headed by the
bioethicist Leon Kass, may add further confusion and delays. No one
seems to know its precise role, including the White House, which
has yet to delineate any of its specific stem cell duties. If the
panel's point is to rule on the ethical questions, didn't the
president already do that? If it's to add another layer of
guidelines as to how the research can proceed, "it could add
another year to the process," says Harold Varmus.

 Yet if scientists — not to mention patients desperately hoping for
stem-cell therapies — got at best a half-loaf out of the Bush
compromise, the anti-abortion absolutists got snookered.

 The pro-life cause (and the Republican platform that parrots it)
has staked its moral rectitude on the belief that life begins at
conception. As Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life
Committee said in July, "We're opposed to federal funding of
research if it kills embryos, whether the killing took place
yesterday or today."

 Well, that was yesterday. By the time the president gave his
go-ahead for federal funds to underwrite research on previously
killed embryos, the White House had smartly romanced the National
Right to Life Committee to the point where it declared itself
"delighted" with the news. A few spoilsports who disagreed with
this retreat — such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops —
were drowned out and marginalized by pro-life politicos like James
Dobson of Focus on the Family and Jerry Falwell, who also
enthusiastically endorsed the Bush speech. Pat Robertson went so
far as to dismiss "ethical dilemmas" as secondary to the "practical
reality" of a "very useful science."

 Pro-choicers should welcome all these former pro-lifers into the
fold. Their position — that it's O.K. to sacrifice embryos to the
greater good of potentially ending the suffering of living juvenile
diabetes and Alzheimer's patients — is at one with the pro-choice
view that in pregnancy embryos sometimes must be sacrificed for the
health of the mother.

 What gives the scientists I spoke with some guarded hope despite
the strictures placed on their work by the president's policy is
that Mr. Bush moved just enough to convince them that the policy
isn't permanent. Though Mr. Bush said he wouldn't change his mind,
they predict that if the 60 stem cell lines aren't accessible or
scientifically useful, the political pressure from patients'
advocacy groups and Congress will force inevitable concessions from
the White House. And now they have the added boon that not just
pro-life senators like Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist but also the
nation's loudest pro-life leaders will be in the president's pocket
when he next capitulates.

 Thanks to the sudden national fixation on stem cells, the entire
country now knows that there are between 100,000 and 200,000 frozen
embryos currently in storage at fertilization clinics, most of them
slated to be killed anyway, most of them with greater potential for
saving lives than becoming lives. As Christopher Reeve has noted,
long before anyone had heard of stem cells there was never any
"outrage that these unwanted fertilized embryos are being thrown in
the garbage." When Mr. Bush inevitably finds another ingenious
"compromise" to make more of them available to medical research,
there won't be outrage either — only votes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/opinion/18RICH.html?ex=999154670&ei=1&en=b982eb9de2fa08a7

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